Episode Report Card M. Giant: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Run for the Border
By M. Giant | Season 17 | Episode 4 | Aired on 10.17.2010
At the lodge, Connor takes off in fifth place, followed by Nick. Jill and Thomas are still running as fast as they can go in the wrong direction, past a parked camping trailer and into the middle of nowhere. "Did we miss an arrow?" Thomas wonders. You could say that. "It looks like we're running into nowhere," Jill says, and the sentiment is emphasized by a sweeping helicopter shot of the vast wilderness in which they seem determined to lose themselves.
Katie starts the dog-sledding Road Block in seventh, followed by Stephanie, who interviews that she loves animals and has wanted a husky for, as she says into Chad's ear, "forever!" Which would be more sympathetic if she weren't saying this literally over a subtitle that describes them as "newly dating."
Jill and Thomas have at least stopped running in the wrong direction, but they still don't know where they are. Somewhere in Scandinavia, I'm guessing, but beyond that I couldn't say.
After the ads, they decide to run back. "We just totally ruined ourselves!" Thomas bitches. "We just ran a mile for no reason," Jill agrees, and asks if he wants to use the Express Pass. "We don't need to panic yet," Thomas says. Plenty of time to panic later.
The dogsled race continues with the other teams, to the extent that any actual racing can be said to be occurring. As Stephanie says, the dogs are doing all the work, and the only challenge for the racers is being tall enough to reach the flags (sorry, Mallory). Jill and Thomas finally make it, and she's on her way.
Meanwhile, after a long drive across country (about 90 minutes, as far as Google Maps and I can tell), Michael and Kevin have arrived at the train station. There's a lot more snow on the ground here, and they notice that it's cold when they get out of the car, so they must have traveled some distance north. And yet Kevin's still wearing shorts. Detour!
Phil rhapsodizes, "The unspoiled wilderness in this part of the world is not only a haven for people who love extreme sports, but also a refuge for people who follow the customs of their ancestors." Unless those ancestors are from Ghana, I assume. In keeping with this, the Detour is a choice between "Sleds" and "Beds," which have nothing else to do with each other aside from how they rhyme. For "Sleds," they'll take a chairlift to the top of a mountain and then use an "extreme sports gadget called a Techsled" to race down a course in less than one minute and 58 seconds to get their next clue. If they biff, as we see a production assistant doing behind Phil while he stands at the finish line, they have to go back up and start over. I don't think the words "extreme" and "gadget" should be used in the same sentence if it's avoidable.